Nix has support for bit reproduction and will not rebuild on comments if you specify it.

Of course lots of software isn't ready for but reproduction which is why Nix has taken such a pragmatic approach. (I have written a lot about this).

It's all a series of tradeoffs. If your goal is reproducibility (as close as you can get), you will have a larger graph likely ..since you are accounting for more!

Sometimes we like to believe we can have our cake and eat it too rather than understand life's a series of tradeoffs.

When we think we are getting a silver bullet, we've likely just pushed that complexity somewhere else.